On Tuesday, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences cast a vote of no confidence against Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers. If the arts and sciences profs were the British Parliament, that would have sent Summers packing up the contents of his office desk. Fortunately for him, it’s the Harvard Corporation, the university’s trustees, who are Summers’s collective boss, not the faculty, so he gets to stay, albeit under a cloud. Summers’s crime: speculating that men and women might be biologically different from each other.
Now comes a scientific study, issued the very day of Summers’s censure, and guess what it shows: that men and women are biologically different from each other!
According to this news report (thanks to Wendy McElroy’s Ifeminists for linking it), an international consortium of scientists spearheaded by Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have cracked the genetic code of women’s second X chromosome, the string of genes that makes them female (males have both an X and a Y chromosome in every cell, while females have two X’s). That second X turns out to have “a unique biology” that can help explain many differences between men and women, one of the scientists explained.
The report comes on the heels of yet another report issued earlier this month, in which scientists at the University of California-Irvine reported that men’s and women’s brains actually look different from each other (different distribution of white and gray matter), and they function differently as well. Too late, alas, to save Summers, who made his remarks in January.
Here’s the news report:
“The research, which is reported in the science journal Nature, shows the Y is an eroded version of the X chromosome with only a few genes. The X chromosome is also bigger than the Y and because females have two copies, one X chromosome is largely switched off or inactivated.
“But not all of the genes on the silenced chromosome are inactivated, which could explain some of the differences between men and women, according to Laura Carrel, of Penn State College of Medicine in Pennsylvania who also reported her findings in the journal.
“The X inactivation also varies widely among women.
“The effects of these genes from the inactive X chromosome could explain some of the differences between men and women that aren’t attributable to sex hormones,” she said in a statement.
“Genetic mutations and diseases such as colour blindness, autism and haemophilia that are linked to the X chromosome tend to affect males because they do not have another X to compensate for the faults.”
Or course such scientific findings aren’t going to sway the feminist ideologues, who base their dogma that the two sexes are intrinsically identical (except for a few reproductive organs and some body hair) not on science but on their own idiosyncratic interpretation of reality. And they’re not going to sway the Harvard faculty, among whom feminist ideology is the official religion, no matter what science says.